MAPS: Exhibition Highlights

Visualizing Nature and Society
As our quest for answers about the earth and its people turns up new data, cartographers develop new ways to visualize it. Using symbols and colors in novel ways the graphic language of maps explores issues ranging from ethnic diversity to geological layers. In revealing the unexpected or unknown about our world, maps can trigger major shifts in scientific thought and help solve practical problems.

Mapping Imaginary Worlds
All maps are in some sense a product of the cartographer's imagination, requiring leaps of creativity to conceptualize the world as a sphere, or discern geological formations. But some maps push the limits of imagination, representing realms that exist only in our minds.

Fantastical maps created for literary works are a clever twist on the mapmaking process: instead of using imagination to visualize physical places, these maps use practical techniques to represent imaginary places.

Living With Maps
People have made maps since the dawn of history, but before the application of printing to mapmaking in the 16th century, few maps made it beyond the governing or religious elites. Printing widened cartography's horizons, and today's digital technologies put maps at the fingertips of millions. Both users and uses have multiplied; we are now using maps in ways that were unimaginable only a few years or even months ago. More than ever maps help us find our place in the world.

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Detail at top: Courtesy of The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore